Learning Styles and Teaching Science

Question: Can you hammer in a nail using a banana?

Answer: Sure you can. If the banana is frozen using liquid nitrogen.

Lesson planning:
Try to hammer a nail with a ripe banana. Make a lot of mess.
Drop another ripe banana into liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds.
Use cryo gloves and crucible tongs to remove the banana. Do not reach into the liquid nitrogen with your gloved hand.
Hold the banana in your gloved hand and hammer the nail successfully.
Do not let the children touch the frozen banana.

Explanation for students: A banana is made up of a lot of water, and water doesn’t make a very good hammer. When frozen, the water molecules slow down and hold tight to one another, creating ice.

Now, wasn’t that a lot more fun than an ordinary science lesson?

That’s what multi-sensory teaching is all about: having fun. Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions advocate multi-sensory teaching as a means of getting students to pay attention, to behave in class and to learn the curriculum.

If you’re a teacher, make things easy for yourself. Depending on the child’s Learning Style, a bored student will most likely act up in class. They may play the fool or refuse to comply with instructions or simply stare out the window and daydream. They will certainly not learn much and they will not make your day.

Determining your students' Learning Style is the first step to a stress-free fun day.
With school science results falling dramatically in many countries, it’s time to resort to tricks such as hammering nails with bananas or soap suds explosion... even if the tricks border on magic. After all, isn’t all science magical? And aren’t magic tricks simply science that we don’t understand yet?

Learning Styles and School Discipline

Many otherwise successful countries (USA, Great Britain, New Zealand) are struggling with educating their children. That’s despite access to fabulous resources such as free schooling, the latest computer technologies, free libraries, learning tools and experienced teachers.

Why?

According to teachers who worked both in developing and in developed countries, it’s all a matter of the environment’s attitude to education. People in Korea or Thailand, just to name a few, have a lot of respect for the school system, and teachers are respected as “the other set of parents away from home”. Education is expensive there, with at least a third of the family’s income being swallowed by schooling costs, and children are appropriately mindful not to waste the hard-earned opportunity they are given.

In contrast, children in developed countries often assume it’s their right not only to have a wonderful free school nearby, but also to get educated by osmosis and without the least bit of effort on their part. If they fail, it’s the teachers’ fault for not teaching well, or the parents’ fault for not choosing the right school, or the school’s fault for... the excuses just get more creative. The result is lack of academic progress and slack discipline at school (see the news box about new measures schools are forced to adopt).

It's time we stopped passing the blame. We are blessed and privileged to have brilliant education assets at our disposal, and all we need to do is change our attitude to learning.

Learning should not be a chore.

Learning should be fun!

The human brain wants to learn: it evolved (or was designed, whichever theory you wish to follow) that way. All you need to do, is get the children’s attitude right, their learning environment optimal to their unique learning style needs and learning tools suitable to multi-sensory stimulation. If you look at the elements in the Learning Style Pyramid, you will see that Motivation, Responsibility, Conformity and Persistence are some of the Attitudes that determine a child’s success at school and their individual learning style.

Your child’s learning style is the way
in which they understand
and remember new concepts.

To analyse your child’s learning style, have a look at this free online demo.

Learning Styles and Lesson Planning

As a teacher, you will be undoubtedly familiar with the idea of Learning Styles (the individual sets of needs and impediments which make up the way students learn). You will probably have used our LSA instruments and free group profiles to assess the learning styles prevailing in your class.

In other words, you will now know which of your students will be most responsive to external awards, what time of day to tackle new concepts and how to arrange your students into study groups. You will know when to present the global picture and when to concentrate on details of the material. You will know which of your students respond best to open-ended exam questions.

But planning every lesson in a way that allows for multi-sensory stimulation requires some consideration and a lot of creativity. In general, you can use the following guidelines, no matter what your subject and syllabus:
- kinesthetic students will benefit from field trips, acting out the lesson, dancing to memorise facts and moving their bodies (for example, forming letters with their arms will help them memorise their shape);
- tactile students will benefit from projects that involve making learning tools and models of new concepts with their hands (for example, a model of a cosine curve shaped out of clay, colouring in a map);
- internally visual students will need to imagine themselves inside the lesson’s topic (for example, in a microscopic boat travelling inside a person’s body when learning biology, or taking part in the Russian Revolution);
- externally auditory students will need to discuss the material with their peers, write and recite a poem about the new topic or explain the lesson to their younger siblings.

For more ideas on how to plan your lessons according to your students’ learning style needs and non-preferences, please refer to our LSA Manual.